Imaging and video systems typically include an image source, such as a video camera, image sensor, or other equipment to capture and digitize visual scenes as video or image data. This data can be stored for later use on digital storage systems, such as servers, storage drives, buffers, or other storage systems. Video or image processing systems can retrieve the image or video data and manipulate the data by performing various operations on the data.
In video surveillance systems, image analysis can be employed to identify objects of interest in a video or frames of the video. These objects of interest can include people, geographical features, vehicles, and the like, and it may be desirable to digitally separate various objects in a video from each other as well as from features that are not of interest. These objects of interest can then be tracked across various frames of the video, and further analysis or action can be taken for the individual objects.
Example object manipulation operations include dilate and erode operations. In the dilate operation, pixels of an object are increased in quantity based on the shape of the object, while in the erode operation, pixels are typically removed from an object based on the edges of the object. A dilate operation followed by an erode operation can also be referred to as a ‘close’ operation. However, when these various operations are performed on image data associated with video of a scene, they can lead to undesirable merging of objects of interest with each other as well as undesirable pixel artifacts internal to the objects.